9781644135945

The Light of the World
FILIUS DATUS
EST NOBIS
Christmastide
The climax of the Christmas season is the birth of Christ. He who is awaited during the season
of Advent with such great longing arrives on Christmas Day. He who comes is true God and true
man, our Savior, “full of grace and truth; . . . and of His fullness we all have received” ( Jn 1:14, 16).
Christmas is the feast of the mercy and love of God. “For God so loved the world as to
give His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish, but may have
life everlasting” ( Jn 3:16). Such is the importance which God places on our salvation and our
eternal happiness.
In the liturgy of Advent, Christ is not so much the weak, helpless babe, as the divine King,
the heavenly Lord and Savior. Christmas has its own peculiar dogmatic character, which differs
from the ideas many pious Christians have of it. Both liturgical piety and popular piety have a
place at the crib of the Savior. The liturgy sees the Son of God in the crib at Bethlehem, a King
and Master, who appears now in His Church to win a place in the souls of men and to establish
His throne in their hearts. He is and must be King. For this reason the liturgy of Christmas and
Epiphany both emphasize the idea of the eternal birth of Christ as God as much as the kingship
of the child who is born to us.
What happened at Bethlehem is for the liturgy a matter both of the past and the present. Each
time the host is consecrated at Mass, the liturgy celebrates Christmas. Our Bethlehem is the
altar and the Christian soul. Like the shepherds of Bethlehem, we bring our gifts to Him at the
Offertory. In a holy exchange He takes those gifts, transmutes them, and gives them back to us
at the time of Holy Communion, that through this exchange we may become like unto Him
in all things (Secreta of the first Mass of Christmas). In Holy Communion the Church places
Him in our hearts as His mother once laid Him in the manger at Bethlehem. The Lord will be
born again in our soul and will take up His abode there. The old man must be put away and a
new life must take possession of us as a result of the Incarnation of the Son of God. The Lord
sets up His throne in our hearts and fills us with His life, His strength, and His grace. “And I live,
now not I; but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2:20). That is the purpose and the gift of Christmas.
Christmas is also a symbol and a pledge of the glorious coming of Christ which all mankind
will witness at the end of the world and which each person will experience individually at the
moment of his death. At Christmas He appears among us as the heavenly, glorified Christ, in
which form He is once to come to judge the living and the dead. Moreover, this glorification
of the humanity of Christ is fulfilled before our eyes. Now we behold it in symbol and in faith;
we behold it in the brightness of the light with which the Church illuminates the Holy Night.
We experience also on the feast of Christmas the coming of the divine King in the flesh.
Then He comes to us in the Bethlehem of our churches and our souls. He comes to us, too, in
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